The Timeline to Tyranny

The Timeline to TyrannyTen advances towards the end of freedom and privacy in the United States

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, August 7, 2007

The top ten advances towards tyranny in the United States during the tenure
of the Bush administration, from the Patriot Act to the latest expansion of
the illegal eavesdropping surveillance program.

1) The USA Patriot Act

The party line often heard from Neo-Cons in their attempts to defend the Patriot
Act either circulate around the contention that the use of the Patriot Act has
never been abused or that it isn’t being used against American citizens. Here
is an archive of articles that disproves both of these fallacies.

The Patriot Act was the boiler plate from which all subsequent attacks on the
Constitution were formed.

2) Total Information Awareness

"Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription
you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail
you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you
make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions
and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a
virtual, centralized grand database," infamously wrote New York Times writer
William Safire, announcing the birth of Total Information Awareness, a kind
of Echelon on steroids introduced a year after 9/11.

TIA was not canned, it was simply removed from the newspaper, renamed and continues
to operate under a guise of different programs.

3) USA Patriot Act II

The second Patriot Act was a mirror image of powers that Julius Caesar and
Adolf Hitler gave themselves. Whereas the First Patriot Act only gutted the
First, Third, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and seriously damaged the Seventh
and the Tenth, the Second Patriot Act reorganized the entire Federal government
as well as many areas of state government under the dictatorial control of the
Justice Department, the Office of Homeland Security and the FEMA NORTHCOM military
command.

The Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003, also known as the Second Patriot
Act is by its very structure the definition of dictatorship.

4) Military Commissions Act

Slamming the final nail in the coffin of everything America used to stand for,
the boot-licking U.S. Senate gave President Bush the legal authority to abduct
and sexually mutilate American citizens and American children in the name of
the war on terror in passing the Military Commissions Act and officially ending
Habeas Corpus.

There is nothing in the "detainee" legislation that protects American
citizens from being kidnapped by their own government and tortured.

The New York Times stated that the legislation introduced, "A dangerously
broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could
subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living
in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope
of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone
he wanted."

Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman states in the L.A. Times, "The compromise
legislation….authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy
combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown
into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other
of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights."

Similarly, law Professor Marty Lederman explains: "this [subsection (ii)
of the definition of ‘unlawful enemy combatant’] means that if the Pentagon
says you’re an unlawful enemy combatant — using whatever criteria they wish
— then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether
or not you have had any connection to ‘hostilities’ at all."

5) John Warner Defense Authorization Act

The Bush Junta quietly "tooled up" to utilize the U.S. military in
engaging American dissidents after the next big crisis, with a frightening and
overlooked piece of legislation that was passed alongside the Military Commissions
Act, the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, which greased the skids for
armed confrontation and abolishes posse comitatus.

6) Illegal Domestic Wiretapping Program

"Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized
the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the
United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved
warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials,"
reported the New York Times on December 16, 2005

The secret warrantless spying program was a complete violation of both the
4th Amendment and FISA.

7) Expansion of Illegal Domestic Wiretapping Program

Not content with now being lawfully allowed to force ISP’s and cell phone companies
to turn over data about customers without a warrant, the Bush administration
is pushing for even more authority to spy on American citizens, and has already
been handed a 6 month window within which to impose any surveillance policy
it likes, and for that program to remain legal in perpetuity.

The administration has a 6 month window in which to impose any surveillance
program it chooses and that program will go unchallenged and remain legally
binding in perpetuity – it cannot be revoked. Under the definitions of the legislation,
Bush has been granted absolute dictator status for a minimum of 6 months.

If he so chooses, and so long as it’s implemented within the next half year,
Bush could build a database of every website visited by every American – and
the policy would be immune from Congressional challenge even after the "surveillance
gap" legislation reaches its sunset

8) Martial Law Presidential Decision Directive 51

New legislation signed on May 9, 2007, declares that in the event of a "catastrophic
event", the President can take total control over the government and the
country, bypassing all other levels of government at the state, federal, local,
territorial and tribal levels, and thus ensuring total unprecedented dictatorial
power.

The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, which also
places the Secretary of Homeland Security in charge of domestic "security",
was signed earlier this month without the approval or oversight of Congress
and seemingly supercedes the National Emergency Act which allows the president
to declare a national emergency but also requires that Congress have the authority
to "modify, rescind, or render dormant" such emergency authority if
it believes the president has acted inappropriately.

9) Destruction of the Dollar

Former World Bank Vice President, Chief Economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph
Stiglitz has predicted a global economic crash within 24 months – unless the
current downturn is successfully managed. Asked if the situation was being properly
handled Stiglitz emphatically responded "no,".

Stiglitz caused controversy in October 2001 when he exposed rampant corruption
within the IMF and blew the whistle on their nefarious methods of inducing countries
to fall under their debt before stripping them of sovereignty and hollowing
out their economies. Stiglitz agreed that the process of hijacking and looting
key infrastructure on the part of the IMF and World Bank, as an offshoot of
predatory globalization, had now moved from the third world to Europe, the United
States and Canada.

10) Amnesty & The North American Union

The open plan to merge the US with Mexico and Canada and create a Pan American
Union has long been a Globalist brainchild but its very real and prescient implementation
on behalf of the Council on Foreign Relations has finally been reported on by
mainstream news outlets.

The framework on which the American Union is being pegged is the NAFTA Super
Highway, a four football-fields-wide leviathan that stretches from southern
Mexico through the US up to Montreal Canada .Coupled with Bush’s blanket amnesty
program, the Pan American Union is the final jigsaw piece for the total dismantling
of America as we know it.